>>I've tried to maintain to-do lists at various points in my life. And I've always failed. Utterly and completely.

I don't know if Jeff has read "Getting Things Done" By David Allen. Or he has read "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. With Regards GTD, David Allen specifically mentions its very easy to get on and off GTD framework. Because GTD does require a level discipline to get it work. Or any Time management framework ever invented for that matter.

If to-do lists are not working for you, then you have one of the signs.

1. You don't have a lot of things to do in your daily schedule at the first place. Making the purpose of list obsolete.

2. You have very few but large monolithic tasks that don't need to be written down, and generally fit in comfortably into your brain cache.

3. You are not frequently interrupted.

4. You don't procrastinate.

5. You are just not disciplined to follow the list discipline.

>>Eventually I realized that the problem wasn't me. All my to-do lists started out as innocuous tools to assist me in my life, but slowly transformed, each and every time, into thankless, soul-draining exercises in reductionism.

Sorry to-do lists do work. Don't make to-do lists a religious ritual you need to follow. They are there for a reason and if you fit into that framework its futile to use it.

>>Lists give the illusion of progress.

When were lists meant to measure progress? They are meant to track your work, your brain only has a limited capacity to store things. When you put to many to-do tasks in your brain, you start to worry about it. And then most of your energy goes into worrying than executing those tasks.

The whole purpose of lists is to dump your brain on paper. Then execute them, if you are interrupted you know where to start after you get back. In other words they work like stacks in software.

>>Lists give the illusion of accomplishment.

Lists of completed Lists are definitely an indication of accomplishment.

>>Lists make you feel guilty for not achieving these things.

That is why they work in most cases.

>>Lists make you feel guilty for continually delaying certain items.
Lists make you feel guilty for not doing things you don't want to be doing anyway.

Why do you put them on the list anyway. Lists are not books used to maintain vision statements. They are tools to put actionable items whose progress you can measure.

>>Lists make you prioritize the wrong things.

Lists are dumb. You create them. How can they make you prioritize wrong things.

The problem is over zealousness. As I said before a list is not your vision statement.

Write things in the list what you want to do. Not what you dream about, or want to have 10 years from now.

David Allen covers this in his book, These sort of things should ideally go in a 10 year plan or whatever year plan and its progress must be reviewed every Saturday or so.

>>Lists are inefficient. (Think of what you could be doing with all the time you spend maintaining your lists!)

Think of what you could not be doing if you didn't know the time needed on what you have been doing, doing currently or likely to do in the future. How will you know where you could save time and use it elsewhere?

>>Lists suck the enjoyment out of activities, making most things feel like an obligation.

This is true if you work at a resort. But if you are somebody who has to 5-6 meetings, go for status updates, answer 20 emails, solve two bugs, tend to your home and track your personal projects all in a day. Without getting organized you are not going to make it.

>>Lists don't actually make you more organized long term.

Because you stop just there. You don't have a list of lists.

>>Lists can close you off to spontaneity and exploration of things you didn't plan for. (Let's face it, it's impossible to really plan some things in life.)

That is why you should run your life like an agile project and not in the waterfall model.

>>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day

Most people don't have 3-most important things in life.

In fact lists exists because most don't have 3-most important things in life.